The sea connects; it does not divide’

Through examining Czechoslovak and Yugoslav engagements with the Adriatic Sea from the 1910s to the early 1930s, this article reveals how tourism in the Adriatic region became a productive impetus for new sensory experiences, as well as artistic, political, and commercial experiments. Using Czech travel accounts and guidebooks; Yugoslav tourist advertisements and newspapers; contemporary tourist journals; tourism iconography; and Yugoslav, Czechoslovak, and French archival sources, I explain how tourism intersected with new leisure values, questions of mobility, and ideological and political agendas. Finally, I ask whether or not these aspects informed tourist practices and understandings of the Adriatic region. Although a contemporary tourist promoter's assertion that ‘the sea connects; it does not divide’ generally encapsulates the horizon of experiences (sensory and otherwise) that Adriatic tourism offered, I argue that tourism was also frequently leveraged for other motives, and thus embodied dynamic paradoxes

Assertion · Czech · Economics · Economy · Ideology · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Tourism · Tourism geography · Central European national history · History · Law